PC gaming

Assassin’s Creed Unity is being dogged by reports of low performance on PCs. We go under the hood, investigate GameWorks-specific performance, and look at the overall engine to see if this is indeed a shoddy PC port.

Clearly, something is not quite right with Assassin’s Creed Unity — but rather than talk about Ubisoft’s disgusting 12-hour delay on reviews, or what appears to be a shoddy PC port, we’re going to focus on something rather interesting: The Xbox One version of Unity runs at a higher frame rate, and feels more responsive, than on the PS4. Given that the PS4 has a considerably beefier GPU, and should generally be capable of higher resolutions and frame rates than the Xbox One, this is a puzzling finding to say the least. What’s going on?

After an absurd 12-hour gap between the release of Assassin’s Creed Unity and the end of the review embargo, one thing is clear: this game is a hot mess. By all accounts, this game was half-baked, and Ubisoft pushed it on consumers anyway.

A new in-engine gameplay video seems to confirm that Assassin’s Creed Unity is really, really pretty. Oh, and bad news if you have a Radeon: The game has certain graphics features that will only be available on Nvidia graphics cards.

The Alienware 13 laptop — announced this morning — will go down in history as the first ever laptop allowed into the vaulted, blustery, and mythical halls of True PC Gaming. While the laptop itself is just an upgraded version of the Alienware 14, it has a new peripheral that will blow your mind: the Alienware Graphics Amplifier, an external enclosure that allows you to attach a full-length desktop graphics card to your laptop.

Ubisoft has announced the minimum requirements for the PC version of Assassin’s Creed Unity — and, well, they’re a little bit puzzling to say the least. At a bare minimum, the new Assassin’s Creed game will require an Nvidia GTX 680 or AMD Radeon HD 7970. The recommended specs take that up to a Core i7-3770 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and a top-of-the-line GTX 780 or Radeon R9 290X. The minimum PC specs are about twice the processing power present in the Xbox One. What on earth is going on?

In addition to Nvidia’s new Maxwell GPU having top-of-the-line performance and power efficiency, it has another feature that will probably make a lot more difference in the real world: It’s the first GPU to offer full support for Microsoft’s upcoming DirectX 12 and Direct3D 12 graphics APIs. According to Microsoft, it has worked with Nvidia engineers in a “zero-latency environment” for several months to get DX12 support baked into Maxwell and graphics drivers. Even more importantly, Microsoft then worked with Epic to get DirectX 12 support baked into Unreal Engine 4, and to build a tech demo of Fable Legends that uses DX12.

Over the last few years, there has been a steadily growing refrain that smartphones have processing power and graphics capabilities that are approaching that of game consoles. This bold assertion began in 2012 with Nvidia saying its mobile GPUs would soon overtake the Xbox 360 — and by 2013 the PS Vita had indeed caught up with the PS3. Now, however, the head of EA’s mobile division has made a very interesting statement indeed: He says that the iPhone 6 is ‘on par’ with the Xbox One and PS4.